Can Schools Be Held Accountable Without Standardized Tests? | MindShift

While many agree that schools should be accountable for student learning, reducing the measurement down to one score, once a year doesn’t help, Morgan said. The school ends up learning that, on the whole, it got better at reading, but nothing about individual skills like fluency of reading, higher order thinking skills, or the ability to tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction. To get that kind of granular feedback, Douglas County has turned to performance-based assessments.

Douglas County started developing its own performance assessments in 2011 to try and measure the kind of thinking and doing students would need for the real world. Teachers now require students to demonstrate knowledge and skills they’ve learned so that they can pinpoint the specific elements of a nuanced learning goal and be able to tell how a student is doing.

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About Dr. Bob- Blog Curator

Bob’s has focused his expertise in technology integration in the K-12 community and teacher education. This expertise touches many different aspects of technology and learning. Areas of particular interest include: Learning, Computational Thinking and STEM, Mobile Learning, 1:1 technology initiatives, problem and project- based learning. Bob's experiences have been enhanced through collaborations with Bonnie Bracey-Sutton who formerly worked as President Clinton’s 21 Century Educator and Raymond Rose who formerly was part of the Concord Consortium, a non profit research and development corporation and the lead institution in developing one of the first virtual high schools in the nation. Other important influences include work at Learning Sciences Research Institute as Senior Research Associate at the University of Illinois Chicago where he was involved with studies of best practices of teacher education and technology. Additional experiences include, working with John Bransford at Vanderbilt University’s Learning Technology Center as Project Coordinator for the school’s Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology Grant (PT3). The grant, national in scope, was responsible for disseminating and helping to implement research on learning and technology into grant activities and the activities of grant partners.
Bob now heads up the IRIS Connect project at the University of Mississippi and is part of the Mobile Learning Portal Project at the University of Texas - Austin. The Portal project involves Dr. Paul Resta, who holds the Ruth Knight Millikan Centennial Professorship in Instructional Technology and serves as Director of the Learning Technology Center at the University of Texas at Austin.